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Ryan Kwanten -- a.k.a. True Blood heartthrob Jason Stackhouse -- is currently almost without hair and hence almost unrecognizable.

The buzz cut is for his role as a Christian monk in a Viking battle epic he's currently filming. It's a far cry from his cute-but-scruffy look as the determined Leo in The Right Kind of Wrong, a subversive little romantic comedy from director Jeremiah Chechik.

As Leo, Kwanten, 37, plays a dreamer who falls in love with a woman (Sara Canning) on the very day she's marrying the perfect guy -- a rich, philanthropic Adonis type played by Ryan McPartlin. How will he get the girl under those circumstances? Never you fear ...

Kwanten says being a shy kid was likely was led to his being actor.

"Being shy gave me the opportunity to sit back, whether at school or at a family get-together, and watch how people talk," he says. "How they interact. Group dynamics. It gave me an objective view of conversations and of people. I never thought about heading into acting," he says, explaining that in fact he did a degree in business at university, "it was the furthest thing from. But in a weird way it set me up to be a more organic actor."

The Australian actor worked on the soap opera Home and Away while simultaneously going to school.

When he was just starting out, says Kwanten, "There wasn't an abundance of substance, so it wasn't like I could sink my teeth into the roles. It's not like I considered it an art form at first. It wasn't a career that I ever thought would lead me to be sitting in a room promoting a film of mine," he says, and he laughs.

"This is above and beyond anything I could have expected. Every day of my life I wake up and think, 'Wow, how in the hell did I get here?'"

Once the parts he got were a bit heftier and more complex, says Kwanten, "I realized there's something to this acting caper. I can actually bring to this something of my own experience ... I made a bunch of tough decisions and that led me to where I am."

Chief among those decisions was to abandon a career in business, and the lengthy education invested in that,

"To move to a career where 99% are out of work and struggling," he says, smiling ruefully. "No other job comes close to that level of unemployment."

But he's never looked back. Besides the mega-success of True Blood, Kwanten has other several successful TV series under his belt and such film as Flicka, Dead Silence, Don't Fade Away, Griff The Invisible and the upcoming Mystery Road (with Hugo Weaving) on his resume.

"In terms of being an artist and being able to express myself physically and emotionally, I think it's such a real liberation," says Kwanten.

"In a weird way actors are these eternal kids. We get paid to play out this innocence, and our emotions. And quite often in ways we wish we could in real life."

‘True Blood’ star Ryan Kwanten talks career change

Ryan Kwanten -- a.k.a. True Blood heartthrob Jason Stackhouse -- is currently almost without hair and hence almost unrecognizable.

The buzz cut is for his role as a Christian monk in a Viking battle epic he's currently filming. It's a far cry from his cute-but-scruffy look as the determined Leo in The Right Kind of Wrong, a subversive little romantic comedy from director Jeremiah Chechik.

As Leo, Kwanten, 37, plays a dreamer who falls in love with a woman (Sara Canning) on the very day she's marrying the perfect guy -- a rich, philanthropic Adonis type played by Ryan McPartlin. How will he get the girl under those circumstances? Never you fear ...